A Poetics of the Interstice: the Mundane and the Metaphysical in Fervor de Buenos Aires

Abstract

In his groundbreaking study of Spanish American Posmodernista poetry, Herve Le Corre makes a passing but potentially significant remark on the symbolic role played by the city in Jorge Luis Borges's early lyric (170). Echoing the main thesis of Sylvia Molloy's Flaneries textuales (488-489), Le Corre contends that the city, or rather its outskirts (el suburbio), constitutes an emblematic space where the poetic self of the posmodernistas is partially unraveled and fragmented by coming into close contact with objects and events from everyday urban life. (1) Le Corre's brief but apt assessment achieves significance when one contextualizes it, as I would, against the background of the Romantic tradition espoused by the modernistas, in oppositional engagement with which the posmodernistas were creating their work. The modernistas based their aesthetic on the Romantic notion (inherited from Kantian idealism) that the poet ought to rely on intuition to access ultimate, noumenal reality, which has a higher ontological status than the phenomenal world, and ought then to strive to reveal it in language). The posmodernistas all but gave up this project because of its unattainability, in order to focus instead on the phenomenal world of sense perception; reality was no longer intelligible, transcendent, and noumenal but perceptible, immanent and phenomenal. Hence the posmodernista poetic persona is that of a witness or observer who comes down to earth and becomes everyman. His poetic vision is transformed into a more modest version of its former prophetic self, no longer centered merely on the plights and joys of his own inner world, but projected onto its concrete, immediate surroundings, regardless how prosaic they may be. This partial transition from the transcendental goals of Romantic idealism to the mundane regions of secular modernity, and to its quintessential dwelling place, the bustling industrial city, is, however, achieved only at a price: the traditional Platonic alliance between truth, goodness, and beauty is compromised, harmony gives way to dissonance, transcendence yields to immanence, and the poet's vision, and hence his own self, becomes increasingly less solipsistic vis-a-vis the Romantics and shows a greater variety of voices or registers as it is poured into humbler environs. The partial unraveling of the poetic self is indeed an important occurrence in Borges's early poetry, particularly in de Buenos Aires, his first published book (1923). (3) This relative dispersion of the Romantic poetic self, significantly, is present in both the output of many posmodernistas and in this collection of poems. Le Corre is, to my knowledge, the first to acknowledge this, but he fails to make much of this connection, merely stating that the trend continues into the Spanish American Vanguard, within which Borges's early poetry is, by consensus, squarely placed. Conversely, I contend that, with regard to the function and limits of the poetic act, Borges's early poetry, particularly de Buenos Aires, marks a transitional, interstitial phase between posmodernista and vanguard (or ultraista) sensibilities. This transition, I shall endeavor to demonstrate, arises from a tension created by the plurality of the poetic personae in de Buenos Aires; but, rather than provide an inventory of the avatars of its lyric ego, as Luis Martinez Cuitino has done in Los Borges del Fervor (52), I will devote my attention to those instances in which the book reveals its transitional, liminal, and marginal nature. This is, in my view, a particularly adept vantage point from which to observe the developing poetics of the young Borges and its placement among the literary currents of his time. The mundane, peri-urban spaces of this early poetry are unevenly matched with a still-Romantic poetic persona, also evident in some of his essays from this period (i. e. Profesion de fe literaria from El tamano de mi esperanza), and with an abiding, albeit equivocal, interest in metaphysics. …